PAPER TO PERSONA /

A call to action:

As the news and paper come unglued, what will pay for journalism in the new news ecosystem? We need a new digital marketplace for information. Managing information overload is an opportunity. That’s what this forthcoming white paper is about. It suggests how publishers can cultivate customized, one-to-one relationships with users, provide them personalized information, and get paid for doing so.

An emerging Attention Economy is transforming the news business. It represents for the institutions which practice journalism a chance to survive beyond the era of mass-market advertising, by becoming “information valets” for their readers, viewers and users. Trust, access, identity and value are core issues, affecting convenience, privacy and personalization. The attention economy will invite new collaboration among news, advertising, publishing, entertainment, technology and philanthropic services.

Thus the defining challenge for news organizations in the 21st century is no longer managing proprietary information, but helping the public manage our attention to ubiquitous information. In less than a decade, we have moved from a world of relative information scarcity — access restricted by a variety of technical choke points — such as presses — to a world of such information abundance that the average user’s challenge is not how to access information, or even how find it, but how to personalize, trust and make sense of it.

The Internet as we know it today is not up to this task. With a new, public-benefit initiative, it will be.

An Information Trust Association will recognize in its governance structure the interests of at least four different constituencies: rights-holders (authors/artists), publishers (aggregators), audience-owners (banks, publishers, billers etc.), and end-users.